Posted in Cats on May 14, 2008 | No Comments »
Sasha died today after a long fight with breast cancer. She took a turn for the worse on Saturday, but bounced back on Sunday and Monday, deciding, after 15 years indoors, that she wanted to spend her last days outside. She promptly dove into the pool on Sunday afternoon. So, we [...]
Posted in science, tagged engineering, physics on May 14, 2008 | No Comments »
HP scientists have discovered a fourth element of electrical circuits, the memrister, the implications of which could be revolutionary:
Engineers could, for example, develop a new kind of computer memory that would supplement and eventually replace today’s commonly used dynamic random access memory (D-RAM). Computers using conventional D-RAM lack the ability to retain information once they [...]
Posted in Religion on May 14, 2008 | No Comments »
This story makes me want to sic a dog on someone. Do administrators have no common sense at all?
Posted in Politics, terrorism, war, tagged Iran, Israel on May 14, 2008 | No Comments »
Paul Mirengoff dissects the Democrats’ “politics of fear” charge, showing that it is (a) question-begging and (b) baseless.
I find it puzzling that people dismiss talk of terrorism as well as the threat from Iran and its quest for nuclear weapons, its much-expressed hatred of Israel, and its conduct of war by proxy as “the politics [...]
Posted in Education on May 14, 2008 | No Comments »
A professor is fired at Norfolk State for failing too many students. This is more common throughout the educational system (especially at the lower levels) than many people think. I failed two students out of eleven as a student teacher at Radnor High School in suburban Philadelphia, and the principal made it clear [...]
Posted in Politics, tagged Obama on May 14, 2008 | No Comments »
Charles Johnson counts the skeletons in Obama’s closet. And we’ve barely opened the door….
Posted in Politics on May 13, 2008 | No Comments »
Antoine Roquentin, the protagonist of Sartre’s Nausea, loves humanity in general—but despises individual people. Rasmussen finds that American voters have the same sort of attitude about Democrats. They strongly favor Democrats in general—they now prefer Democrats to Republicans on every one of ten issues—but nevertheless have much less favorable attitudes toward particular Democratic [...]
Posted in Equality, Politics, tagged affirmative action on May 12, 2008 | No Comments »
Richard D. Kahlenburg urges Barack Obama to propose ending race-based affirmative action, substituting class-based affirmative action in its place—mostly as a political ploy to move “beyond race” while still channeling mopst fo the program’s benefits to minorities. Commenters give some arguments that Kahlenburg’s political analysis leaves out:
There’s no conflict between academic merit and the [...]
Posted in Distributive Justice, Equality, Politics, economics, tagged minimum wage on May 12, 2008 | No Comments »
Megan McArdle writes disapprovingly of the minimum wage:
Both at Crooked Timber, and in my own beloved comment threads, the suggestion has been made that the minimum wage is really swell because it gets rid of low-productivity jobs that only pay the minimum wage.
This sounds lovely–if you are the kind of person who has the skills [...]
Posted in philosophy, tagged causation on May 10, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Murder or suicide? (HT: Brian Hollar)
